During the early 1990s, farmers in Oklahoma, Kansas and four other southern Great Plains states planted more than 32 million acres of wheat annually. Much of it was produced practicing little or no rotation, and with mounting problems due to deliberate monocropping.
A group of university researchers representing these states recognized the dire need for crop diversification and the development of alternative crops. They identified the soft-seeded (minor) oilseeds as promising for the region and zeroed in on canola, which promised the benefit of breaking disease and other pest cycles in wheat. The group formed the Great Plains Canola Council (GPCC) in 1990.
Don’t look now, but more yellow flowers may be popping up across Kansas, and they are not of the sunflower variety, which is the official state flower.
As a grain trader would profess, efficient and effective trade is based on the principal of fungibility, allowing for the substitution of grain from source to source as market conditions dictate. Since the introduction of biotech crops, growers and traders have both benefitted from increases in yield and overall productivity, however, the patchwork map of regulatory systems for biotech crops has created significant hurdles in maintaining this fungibility.
The 2016 canola harvest has all but wrapped up in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and it was another good year – fields averaged 3,000 pounds per acre and one grower exceeded 5,000 pounds per acre. But more importantly, it was another year of successful rotational crops for Willamette Valley farmers.
Interest in canola as a rotation crop in the cereal-dominated cropping systems of the Pacific Northwest continues to increase, particularly with depressed wheat prices, and with steady demand from the Pacific Coast Canola processing facility in Warden, Wash. The 
While many policy matters are on idle as we enter the heat of summer and this election year, biodiesel policy issues are not slowing down.
Over the last several thousand years, humans have taken a more active role in the evolution of plants by specifically saving and selecting seed from plants that looked, smelled or tasted particularly interesting. The result was the domestication of plants, making it easier to grow and harvest them and become better, more reliable and nutritious sources of food. This same process continues today, though in a more formalized way, using the science and art of plant breeding.
On Jan. 7, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services issued the